For the third offseason in a row, the Detroit Lions face uncertainty at kicker. Ever since Matt Prater chose greener pastures in Arizona after the 2020 season, the Lions have cycled through potential replacements.
It has not gone well.
Austin Seibert. Riley Patterson. Zane Gonzalez. Aldrick Rosas. Ryan Santoso. Dominik Eberle. All had their chances — some more than one — and they all quickly fizzled away.
The last replacement attempt has been the most successful thus far. Michael Badgley joined the Lions in Week 7 and quickly proved capable. He was perfect on placekicks in his first five games.
Alas, Badgley’s hot streak came to an end. He finished the season making 20 of his 24 field goal attempts for the Lions. Most painful was the 29-yarder Badgley yanked wide in the 3-point loss to the Bills on Thanksgiving, his first miss for Detroit.
Badgley is one of the Lions’ pending free agents this offseason. The 27-year-old is good enough to bring back, but also not so good that Lions GM Brad Holmes couldn’t find a better kicker.
Badgley finished the season ranked 18th in the NFL in field goal percentage at 24-for-28 (he was 4-for-4 with Chicago before joining the Lions). He tied for 18th with Patterson, who became the full-time kicker for the Jaguars. On long field goals, Badgley was 2-for-3 from beyond 50 yards with a long of 53. The “Money Badger” was perfect on extra points, one of just three kickers league-wide to hit all conversions.
One knock against Badgley is that he typically does not handle kickoffs. In five NFL seasons, Badgley has just 27 kickoffs to his credit, including eight with the Lions. His career touchback percentage on kickoffs is 25.9, a very low figure that helps explain why his teams have typically had the punter handle kickoffs. That’s not a dealbreaker for Detroit; punter Jack Fox ranked 10th in the league (min. 10 attempts) in touchback percentage at 71.4.
Badgley stacks up pretty well against the rest of the free agent class in 2023. The top names include Green Bay’s Mason Crosby, Robbie Gould from the 49ers, Greg Zuerlein of the Jets, Prater from Arizona, Minnesota’s Greg Joseph and Eddy Piniero from Carolina.
Age all but rules out Crosby (38), Gould (40), Zuerlein (35) and even Prater (38), who was the NFL’s least-accurate continuously employed kicker over the last three seasons when combining FGs and XPs; Zuerlein is 2nd on that list. Joseph was 4-for-10 from beyond 50 yards but missed a league-high six extra points. Piniero, 27, is coming off the best year of his three-year career and will probably be judged the top option in free agency. Washington’s Joey Slye and Chase McLaughlin of the Colts are also worth mentioning as options.
In short, there is very little certainty that any of the experienced kickers would be upgrades over Badgley unless the Lions decide they don’t want Fox to handle kickoff duties any longer, which is a real possibility.
Drafting kickers is inherently perilous, though the payoff can be quite nice.
There was one kicker taken in the 2022 NFL draft, Cade York, in the fourth round by the Cleveland Browns. He made just 75 percent of his field goals in an erratic rookie season, lower than his freshman year percentage at LSU.
But a year earlier, Cincinnati selected Evan McPherson from Florida in the fifth round. McPherson has made 84 percent of his FG attempts over two seasons with the Bengals, including several clutch and game-winning field goals. He’s 14-for-16 from beyond 50 yards.
This year’s draft class at kicker is highlighted by three names at the top. Two of them have won the Lou Groza Award in their career, though neither did that in 2022. Jake Moody of Michigan (2021) and Andre Szmyt (2018) from Syracuse have had some tremendous success but also rough years after their great ones. Moody and Szmyt each missed six FGs in 2022, one below the most in college football.
The top kicker is likely Missouri’s Harrison Mevis, who has the longest successful FG of any draft-eligible kicker at 56 yards — and he hit that in two different college seasons.
This is a case where Holmes and the Lions will need to weigh relative stability and success with Badgley against the chance to potentially get a little better — or worse — with either a veteran free agent or a rookie. It’s not likely to be an easy decision for Detroit.
